SoSe 25  
Centre for Teac...  
English  
Course

Master's programme in Teacher Education (120 cp)

English

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  • English Didactics for Primary Schools: Selected Topics

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    • 17482 Seminar
      Ausgewählte Themen: Digital Tools (Christian Ludwig)
      Schedule: Mo 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-14)
      Location: KL 29/208 Übungsraum (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      Digital technology and artificial intelligence are integral parts of the modern world, profoundly shaping the experiences of today’s teenage generation. Growing up in an era dominated by the digital landscape presents both unique opportunities and challenges. This course begins by examining what it means to grow up in the digital age, considering the impact of technology on young people’s lives.

      The course then explores innovative ways to incorporate digital tools into the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. By leveraging technology, educators can foster greater collaboration, enhance communication, and encourage more interactive, authentic, and engaging language learning experiences.

      Taking a project-based approach, students will also delve into the potential risks and dangers associated with the digital and AI age – such as bias, cyberbullying, misinformation, privacy concerns, and the impact of screen time on mental health. By addressing these issues, students will develop a deeper understanding of how to navigate the digital world safely and responsibly.

    • 17483 Seminar
      Ausgewählte Themen: Visions of the Future - Utopia and Dystopia in ELT (Katja Heim)
      Schedule: Do 16:00-18:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-17)
      Location: JK 31/124 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      Visions of the future highlight our wishes, fears, and views on the world.  When it comes to literature, which portrays such visions, it also reflects societal trends at the time of writing, often coupled with references to historical recurrence. Analytical and creative approaches to engaging with such literature help view society through different lenses and help to think through the potential consequences of societal trends and decision-making.

      In this course, we will refer to possible futures by exploring futures studies and current perceived trends. We will then take a literature-based approach. We will choose together which dystopian novels we would like to explore more closely. Books that could be chosen include, for example, frequently read novels, such as The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood), The Hunger Games (Collins), The Circle (Eggers), or The Giver (Lowry). We will read extracts from different books throughout the course and we will also include multimodal sources, such as film and art. In addition, each of you will engage with one chosen dystopian or utopian novel within a group and will, by the end of the course, have developed and presented a complex competence task for using the book in class. You will need to purchase this one chosen book. All other texts will be provided via Blackboard. While the theme of this course is classically taught at higher secondary level, it is also relevant for younger learners. Future primary school teachers will also be able to work with future-related picturebooks and other, more accessible texts for younger learners.

      Parts of this course will be taught online. Dates for on-site and online sessions will be announced in class. The first two sessions will be on-site.

    • 17484 Seminar
      Ausgewählte Themen: Multilingualism in ELT (Natasha Janzen-Ulbricht)
      Schedule: Mi 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-16)
      Location: KL 32/202 Übungsraum (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      Multilingualism in ELT: Strategies for Diverse and Learner-Centred Classrooms


      This seminar addresses the role multilingualism can play in English teaching, offering strategies for including students' linguistic backgrounds to create inclusive, effective and creative learning environments. As with other “Lehr-Lern-Labor (LLL)” courses, this seminar is an opportunity to explore simplified teaching and learning situations through actual classroom practice. This takes place during two sessions with primary level pupils in the ELT Multilingualism Learning Lab. Participants prepare learning materials for the first Student Lab session. Subsequently, building on results and observation from session one, these teaching materials are further developed and taught a second time. Course meetings are conducted in English (CEF: C1/C2).

      Students are expected to attend class regularly and to participate actively, which includes reading assigned texts to prepare for each session, and handing in a number of small writing assignments during the course of the semester.

      Assigned texts will be announced at the beginning of the term.

      The examination consists of a final 12-15 page paper. The topic can be selected from across the entire content spectrum of the seminar. (For topic selection, see the general style sheet.) The paper must be handed in by the end of the first week of the next semester.

      Course structure: lectures, discussions, group/partner work, hands-on activities.

  • Specialization Module D3: Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures

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    • 17358 Lecture
      V-Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures: Postcolonial Theory (Stephan Laqué)
      Schedule: Do 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-17)
      Location: Hs 1b Hörsaal (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      Postcolonial theory analyses the lingering effects of colonial expansion and oppression and thereby addresses pivotal issues of our globalised world. It has adopted terms such as ‘hybridity’ and ‘mimicry’ from other disciplines and turned them into new and influential concepts. Starting from Edward Said's seminal book Orientalism, this lecture will follow the trajectory of Postcolonial Studies from the late 1970s to the present day.

    • 17359 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures: Australian Literatures (Caroline Kögler)
      Schedule: Di 14:00-16:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: JK 27/106 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      This seminar delves into current Australian literature with a particular eye for indigenous and/or queer perspectives. In addition to taking the texts in question seriously as literary forms with specific aesthetic properties, we will pay attention to the socio-political and cultural conditions into which these texts have emerged and in which they are entangled. This will include an angle on the Australian publishing industry and those conventions and forces that have rendered (some of) these texts and authors “prizeworthy” in the eye of different Australian prizing committees and readers.

      Following an initial session in the first week of term (15th April), the second week (22nd) will be a reading/group work week in preparation for a first reading quiz on April 29th, which will focus on Gadsby’s and Lonesborough’s texts. Later in the term, we will have another quiz on Lucashenko’s novel and the Boochani excerpts. Each quiz is to ensure that we have a foundation for informed and active class participation.

      Mandatory reading:

      • Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation (2022)
      • Hannah Gadsby “Nanette” (2018) [stand-up comedy film / Netflix]
      • Gary Lonesborough, The Boy from the Mish (2021)
      • Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie (2023)
      • Behrouz Boochani, No Friend but the Mountains (2018) [excerpts]

    • 17360 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures: Transcultural Memoirs – Postcolonial and Queer Perspectives (Caroline Kögler)
      Schedule: Di 18:00-20:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: JK 27/106 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      This seminar delves into current transcultural memoirs within an intersecting queer and postcolonial framework. In addition to taking the texts in question seriously as literary forms with specific aesthetic properties, we will pay attention to the socio-political and cultural conditions into which these texts have emerged and in which they are entangled.

      Following an initial session in the first week of term (15th April), the second week (22nd) will be a reading/group work week in preparation for a reading quiz on April 29th. This first quiz will be about the texts by Evaristo and Gyasi. Later in the term, we will have a quiz on the works by Habib and Gadsby. Each quiz is to ensure that we have a foundation for informed and active class participation.

      Mandatory reading:

      • Bernardine Evaristo, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up (2021)
      • Yaa Gyasi, Home Going (2016)
      • Kama La Mackerell, Zom-Fam (2020) [poetry; excerpts will be provided]
      • Salma Habib, We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir (2019)
      • Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation (2022)
      • Hannah Gadsby “Nanette” (2018) [stand-up comedy film / Netflix]

  • Specialization Module D4: Culture - Gender - Media

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    • 17361 Lecture
      V-Culture - Gender - Media: Shakespeare in Contemporary Culture (Sabine Schülting)
      Schedule: Mi 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-16)
      Location: Hs 1b Hörsaal (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Information for students

      Der Termin am Mi, 04.06.25 muss leider entfallen.

      Comments

      This lecture series will introduce students to the broad scope of contemporary engagements with Shakespeare’s plays and poetry: in literary texts, on stage, in film, and in other media. We will consider various strategies of dealing with Shakespeare, such as adaptation, translation, quotation, rewriting, appropriation, etc. Lectures will consider the potential tension between popular culture and Shakespeare’s high canonicity, and explore the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays and poems have been used to address contemporary debates about gender and sexuality, race, and political power. Students will also be introduced to relevant approaches in Shakespeare Studies.

      The course will be organized as a lecture series with discussion. In most weeks, the focus will be on one Shakespeare play and its adaptations and/or rewritings. Students will be encouraged to prepare for the discussion by reading the respective play. More details about the syllabus will be provided in the first week of class.

      Exchange students are of course welcome. You can get 2 ECTS for participation. There is no exam in this course.

    • 17362 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Culture - Gender - Media: Cyborgs, Androids and AIs: Re-Imagining the Human (Sabine Schülting)
      Schedule: Di 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: JK 27/106 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      At the end of the 20th century, several scholars famously pronounced that we had become “posthuman” (N. Katherine Hayles) and that “we are cyborgs” (Donna Haraway). Two and a half decades later, this diagnosis seems even more accurate: cyborgs, androids, and artificial intelligence populate literature and film; ‘cyborg’ technology in medicine can replaces limbs, organs, and senses; and artificial intelligence assists us in various ways in our daily lives, from applications in our phones to digital assistants and chatbots. What are the implications of these developments for a traditional understanding of the human and the relationship between humans and machines? How do these transformations impact ideas about, and representations of, the human body and embodiment? What ethical and socio-political issues are at stake?

      We will explore these questions with the help of theoretical approaches from the fields of Posthumanism, Gender Studies and Critical Race Studies, as well as literary texts and films. We will read two contemporary novels – Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) – and watch two films – Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014) and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012). We will also have a chat with Chat GPT.

      Texts: Students should purchase and read Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021). Both novels are available in inexpensive paperback editions. Shorter texts will be uploaded on Blackboard.

      Assessment will be on the basis of regular attendance, active participation in class activities (such as short presentations, group work, short written assignments etc.) and the submission of an essay (of c. 4000 words). Exchange students with a background in English and/or Cultural Studies are of course welcome; your proficiency in English should be at least B2. Exchange students can get up to 10 ECTS for this course.

    • 17363 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Culture - Gender - Media: The London Flâneur (Jennifer Wawrzinek)
      Schedule: Di 14:00-16:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: KL 32/202 Übungsraum (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      In his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life”, Charles Baudelaire describes the figure of the flâneur as the archetypal observer of Modernity, strolling the streets of Paris to transmute experience into art. Walter Benjamin later describes the flâneur as a modern artist-poet, keenly aware of the bustle of modern life, an amateur detective and investigator of the city, but also a sign of the city and of capitalism. For Baudelaire and Benjamin, the flâneur is not only a literary figure, but one that is distinctly French, male, and associated with a burgeoning Parisian urban culture. Yet by the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was London, not Paris, that was the largest urban centre within Europe, counting over one million citizens by 1801 and expanding to one and a half million within the first decade of the century. It is no surprise, therefore, that London writers also explored the changing shape of the city and its burgeoning consumer cultures through the figure of the stroller, who explores the streets of London to reflect on the changing shape of the city and its relationship to the emerging British Empire. Using Benjamin’s concept of the flâneur, and Ranciére’s concept of ‘the shop of history’, this course will examine writings by early-nineteenth-century urban peripatetics who took to the streets of London as observers of everyday life. Students will be asked to consider the ways in which strolling, walking and loitering can be seen in these texts as disruptions and/or refigurations of the space-time of the burgeoning British nation and its consolidation of national and imperial identity, inscriptions and/or destabilisations of urban space in terms of gender and class, as well as negotiations of emerging forms of commodity capitalism.

      Set Texts:

      • Charles Dickens, Night Walks.
      • Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
      • Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia.

      A Course Reader will be made available on Blackboard prior to the beginning of semester.

    • 17364 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Culture - Gender - Media: Unreliable Narration (Lukas Lammers)
      Schedule: Mi 14:00-16:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-16)
      Location: JK 27/106 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      This course aims to provide insights into concepts and examples of unreliable narration across a variety of genres and media. Narrators wield enormous power: they build worlds and guide readers in numerous ways (not least morally and emotionally). But what if the narrator abuses this power to create and guide? What if the narrator does not tell the truth, or at least ‘bends it’? And what is the truth of/in fiction anyway? How would we be able to establish the fictional truth of a text? What makes us trust or distrust a narrator? In this course, we want to explore the phenomenon of unreliable narration and see how deep the rabbit hole goes. This will lead us to consider some fundamental questions about literature and interpretation and to read some fascinating texts.

      We will start with William C. Booth’s classic definition of the term in his book The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) to discuss its insights and possible shortcomings. In the course of the semester, we will then explore alternative concepts of unreliability, including cognitive, rhetorical, and genre-based approaches. This will allow us to analyse techniques used by authors to create unreliable narrators in literature and film and examine the ways in which unreliable narration challenges traditional notions of truth and reality.

      Close readings will be essential to our discussion. We will study two novels, extracts from several other novels, selected short fiction, as well as a few examples from film and discuss how far unreliability is bound up with notions of gender, race, class, and genre. What leads us to suspect that something is amiss? Is it the text itself? Is it more widely shared ‘frames’? What about texts narrated by machines?

      Students wishing to participate must have completed the AM Surveying English Literatures. Assessment will be on the basis of short contributions to a Blackboard forum/wiki, a short presentation in class (‘aktive Teilnahme’) and a final essay of 4000 words to be submitted after the end of class. One of the core readings for this seminar is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Students wishing to participate might want to acquire the book before the start of term (Recommended: Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. 1988. London: Faber and Faber, 2010).

  • Specialization Module D5: Sociolinguistics and Varieties

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    • 17366 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Socioling. and Varieties of English: Asian Englishes (Sofia Rüdiger)
      Schedule: Di 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: JK 27/106 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      English is spoken around the world, but, in this course, we will focus on one specific regional context: Asia. The contexts of use of English in Asia are dynamic, vibrant, and complex. Drawing on a diverse range of materials and previous research, we will explore, among others, the Englishes of India, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. Besides the linguistic description of different Asian English varieties, this course will also consider the role of English in the linguistic landscape, language policies, cultural artefacts (such as K-pop), and language attitudes.

  • Specialization Module D6: Structure of English

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  • Specialization Module D1: Modernity and Alterity in the Literatures of Medieval Britain

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    • 17351 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Literatures of Medieval Britain: Authorship (Wolfram Keller)
      Schedule: Mo 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-14)
      Location: KL 29/208 Übungsraum (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      The question as to what it means to be an author has been fueled in recent years by the omnipresence of texts generated by Large Language Models such as ChatGPT. In this seminar, we shall look into the history of authorship to see how writers in the (late) Middle Ages and the early modern period thought about authorship, about literary innovation and about individuality. At the beginning of the semester, we shall reconsider the history of – and theories about – authorship, especially the debates concerning the death (and resurrection) of the author. We will then consider recent work focused particularly on medieval and early modern authorship, before we shall turn to medieval and early modern literary texts – selected on the basis of the participants’ interests – to see how writers represent conceptualizations of literary authorship within their works.   

    • 17352 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Literatures of Medieval Britain: Dark-Age Britain (Wolfram Keller)
      Schedule: Di 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: KL 29/208 Übungsraum (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      This seminar focuses on beginnings – more specifically on the question of the beginnings of Britain. One of the key ‘historical’ texts for the history of Britain in the late Middle Ages and the ‘Renaissance' is Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, in which Geoffrey recounts how Britain was first founded by the Trojan Brutus. The Trojan origins of Britain are not the only (invented and inventive) episode within the Historia that inspired English authors to reflect about the history of Britain, the story of the legendary King Leir, re-staged, as it were, in William Shakespeare’s King Lear being another. The latter is one of several Shakespeare plays which is set in what one could refer to as dark-age Britain. In the course of the semester, we shall read theses plays – King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet – with a view to how they construct ‘medieval’ ‘English' history and the ways in which these constructions become poetologically productive.             

  • Specialization Module D2: Literary Studies: Periods - Genres - Concepts

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    • 17353 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Periods - Genres - Concepts: Modernism and the Animal (Jennifer Wawrzinek)
      Schedule: Mo 16:00-18:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-14)
      Location: JK 31/124 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      In 1871 Charles Darwin published his ground-breaking theory of evolution, The Descent of Man, in which he describes human evolution as arising from processes of biological adaptation and natural selection. In positing that all species of life have descended from common ancestors, Darwin destabilised the distinction between human and nonhuman beings, thus radically undermining the assumption of human privilege within the natural world. Although the Victorian attitude toward Darwinism maintained an attempt to sustain a humanist worldview, Modernist writers in the early twentieth century can be seen to invert the traditional humanist position by valuing and embracing animal force or animal consciousness. This course will examine the role of the animal and the relation between human and animal in key texts by Modernist writers in the first half of the twentieth century. Beginning with Darwin’s theories of evolution, students will read novels and poems by writers such as Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot and Ted Hughes, in order to examine the ways in which Modernist writers have engaged with the paradoxical status of the human as both primate, material body and abstract intellectual mind. Students will be encouraged to ask questions around the role of the animal in Modernist writing as either a critique of, and/or potential answer to the alienation that many writers of the period felt as the primary condition of Moderntiy.

      Set Texts: 

      • Woolf, Virginia. Flush.
      • Lawrence, D.H. The Fox.

      A Course Reader will be made available on Blackboard prior to the beginning of semester.

      Assessment: one 4000-word essay due after the end of semester

       

    • 17354 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Periods - Genres - Concepts: Shakespeare's Romances (Stephan Laqué)
      Schedule: Mi 16:00-18:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-16)
      Location: JK 27/106 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      Shakespeare’s late plays form a fairly distinct group of texts whose artificial and often incoherent plotlines, improbable changes of events and less-than-subtle spectacle seem to jar with the seriousness and craftsmanship of his revered comedies and tragedies. We will look at these ‘Romances’ not as a finale to Shakespeare’s work, but as plays which cut across different genres, philosophical concerns and textual strategies. Central issues will be strangeness, magic, suffering and movement. Please purchase print editions of the following texts (preferably Arden or the Norton Shakespeare) which we are going to read in this order: Cymbeline, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest.

    • 17355 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Periods - Genres - Concepts: Scotland's HisStories (Cordula Lemke)
      Schedule: Fr 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-25)
      Location: KL 29/208 Übungsraum (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      Today's image of Scotland is still dominated by the myth of peaty and moss-covered Highlands and their tartan-wearing inhabitants who entertain weary travellers with tales of ghosts and murderers. These apparently old and authentic traditions can often be traced back to the need to create a Scottish national identity in the eighteenth century and many of them were reshaped and invented by the highly prolific writer Sir Walter Scott who can indeed be seen as one of the main sources of this mythical image of Scotland – or “Scott-land”. Not only have these inventions found their way into the novels of Scott’s time, but their legacy still remains today. In this seminar we will look at the myths Scott created, at how these inventions affect the image of Scotland today and how and whether the myths are contested by today’s rewritings.

      Texts:

      • Walter Scott, Waverley (Penguin Classics)
      • Alan Warner, Nothing Left to Fear from Hell
      • Val McDermid, Queen Macbeth

    • 17356 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Periods - Genres - Concepts: Poetry and Prose of the Romantic Period (Susanne Schmid)
      Schedule: Termine siehe LV-Details (Class starts on: 2025-05-10)
      Location: J 27/14 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      The Romantic age, the period between 1760 and 1830, was not only a politically rebellious phase but also rich in literature, particularly in a poetry that departed from previous rules. Among the themes of this new poetry were the miraculous, the fantastic, the monstrous, sublime and beautiful nature as well as the rebellious and solitary individual. We will read and discuss poems by William Blake, William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy B. Shelley, John Keats, the 'big six', but also by well-known women poets, for example Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. In addition, we will look at prose texts, ranging from fiction to essay writing.

      Our central prose text will be William Godwin's forceful novel Things as They Are; or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), which famously highlights the topics of justice and power. Shorter poetological texts as well as documents about the wider political context (the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars) will round off the picture. Besides, we will look into Romantic-period print culture.

      Course requirements: regular and active attendance, oral presentation, term paper (Hausarbeit).

      Reading:

      • William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin Classics, 2003).

      Further information about the poems will be made available.

      Recommended background reading:

      • Frederick Burwick, A History of Romantic Literature (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2019).
      • Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 3rd or 4th ed. (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2006 / 2012). This book contains most of the shorter text we will be reading as well as very useful introductions to authors and contexts. You may want to look at it.

       

  • Specialization Module D3: Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures

    0546bA1.10
    • 17358 Lecture
      V-Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures: Postcolonial Theory (Stephan Laqué)
      Schedule: Do 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-17)
      Location: Hs 1b Hörsaal (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      Postcolonial theory analyses the lingering effects of colonial expansion and oppression and thereby addresses pivotal issues of our globalised world. It has adopted terms such as ‘hybridity’ and ‘mimicry’ from other disciplines and turned them into new and influential concepts. Starting from Edward Said's seminal book Orientalism, this lecture will follow the trajectory of Postcolonial Studies from the late 1970s to the present day.

    • 17359 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures: Australian Literatures (Caroline Kögler)
      Schedule: Di 14:00-16:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: JK 27/106 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      This seminar delves into current Australian literature with a particular eye for indigenous and/or queer perspectives. In addition to taking the texts in question seriously as literary forms with specific aesthetic properties, we will pay attention to the socio-political and cultural conditions into which these texts have emerged and in which they are entangled. This will include an angle on the Australian publishing industry and those conventions and forces that have rendered (some of) these texts and authors “prizeworthy” in the eye of different Australian prizing committees and readers.

      Following an initial session in the first week of term (15th April), the second week (22nd) will be a reading/group work week in preparation for a first reading quiz on April 29th, which will focus on Gadsby’s and Lonesborough’s texts. Later in the term, we will have another quiz on Lucashenko’s novel and the Boochani excerpts. Each quiz is to ensure that we have a foundation for informed and active class participation.

      Mandatory reading:

      • Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation (2022)
      • Hannah Gadsby “Nanette” (2018) [stand-up comedy film / Netflix]
      • Gary Lonesborough, The Boy from the Mish (2021)
      • Melissa Lucashenko, Edenglassie (2023)
      • Behrouz Boochani, No Friend but the Mountains (2018) [excerpts]

    • 17360 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Colonial and Postcolonial Literatures: Transcultural Memoirs – Postcolonial and Queer Perspectives (Caroline Kögler)
      Schedule: Di 18:00-20:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: JK 27/106 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      This seminar delves into current transcultural memoirs within an intersecting queer and postcolonial framework. In addition to taking the texts in question seriously as literary forms with specific aesthetic properties, we will pay attention to the socio-political and cultural conditions into which these texts have emerged and in which they are entangled.

      Following an initial session in the first week of term (15th April), the second week (22nd) will be a reading/group work week in preparation for a reading quiz on April 29th. This first quiz will be about the texts by Evaristo and Gyasi. Later in the term, we will have a quiz on the works by Habib and Gadsby. Each quiz is to ensure that we have a foundation for informed and active class participation.

      Mandatory reading:

      • Bernardine Evaristo, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up (2021)
      • Yaa Gyasi, Home Going (2016)
      • Kama La Mackerell, Zom-Fam (2020) [poetry; excerpts will be provided]
      • Salma Habib, We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir (2019)
      • Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette: A Memoir Situation (2022)
      • Hannah Gadsby “Nanette” (2018) [stand-up comedy film / Netflix]

  • Specialization Module D4: Culture - Gender - Media

    0546bA1.11
    • 17361 Lecture
      V-Culture - Gender - Media: Shakespeare in Contemporary Culture (Sabine Schülting)
      Schedule: Mi 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-16)
      Location: Hs 1b Hörsaal (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Information for students

      Der Termin am Mi, 04.06.25 muss leider entfallen.

      Comments

      This lecture series will introduce students to the broad scope of contemporary engagements with Shakespeare’s plays and poetry: in literary texts, on stage, in film, and in other media. We will consider various strategies of dealing with Shakespeare, such as adaptation, translation, quotation, rewriting, appropriation, etc. Lectures will consider the potential tension between popular culture and Shakespeare’s high canonicity, and explore the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays and poems have been used to address contemporary debates about gender and sexuality, race, and political power. Students will also be introduced to relevant approaches in Shakespeare Studies.

      The course will be organized as a lecture series with discussion. In most weeks, the focus will be on one Shakespeare play and its adaptations and/or rewritings. Students will be encouraged to prepare for the discussion by reading the respective play. More details about the syllabus will be provided in the first week of class.

      Exchange students are of course welcome. You can get 2 ECTS for participation. There is no exam in this course.

    • 17362 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Culture - Gender - Media: Cyborgs, Androids and AIs: Re-Imagining the Human (Sabine Schülting)
      Schedule: Di 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: JK 27/106 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      At the end of the 20th century, several scholars famously pronounced that we had become “posthuman” (N. Katherine Hayles) and that “we are cyborgs” (Donna Haraway). Two and a half decades later, this diagnosis seems even more accurate: cyborgs, androids, and artificial intelligence populate literature and film; ‘cyborg’ technology in medicine can replaces limbs, organs, and senses; and artificial intelligence assists us in various ways in our daily lives, from applications in our phones to digital assistants and chatbots. What are the implications of these developments for a traditional understanding of the human and the relationship between humans and machines? How do these transformations impact ideas about, and representations of, the human body and embodiment? What ethical and socio-political issues are at stake?

      We will explore these questions with the help of theoretical approaches from the fields of Posthumanism, Gender Studies and Critical Race Studies, as well as literary texts and films. We will read two contemporary novels – Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021) – and watch two films – Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014) and Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012). We will also have a chat with Chat GPT.

      Texts: Students should purchase and read Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019) and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021). Both novels are available in inexpensive paperback editions. Shorter texts will be uploaded on Blackboard.

      Assessment will be on the basis of regular attendance, active participation in class activities (such as short presentations, group work, short written assignments etc.) and the submission of an essay (of c. 4000 words). Exchange students with a background in English and/or Cultural Studies are of course welcome; your proficiency in English should be at least B2. Exchange students can get up to 10 ECTS for this course.

    • 17363 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Culture - Gender - Media: The London Flâneur (Jennifer Wawrzinek)
      Schedule: Di 14:00-16:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: KL 32/202 Übungsraum (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      In his 1863 essay “The Painter of Modern Life”, Charles Baudelaire describes the figure of the flâneur as the archetypal observer of Modernity, strolling the streets of Paris to transmute experience into art. Walter Benjamin later describes the flâneur as a modern artist-poet, keenly aware of the bustle of modern life, an amateur detective and investigator of the city, but also a sign of the city and of capitalism. For Baudelaire and Benjamin, the flâneur is not only a literary figure, but one that is distinctly French, male, and associated with a burgeoning Parisian urban culture. Yet by the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was London, not Paris, that was the largest urban centre within Europe, counting over one million citizens by 1801 and expanding to one and a half million within the first decade of the century. It is no surprise, therefore, that London writers also explored the changing shape of the city and its burgeoning consumer cultures through the figure of the stroller, who explores the streets of London to reflect on the changing shape of the city and its relationship to the emerging British Empire. Using Benjamin’s concept of the flâneur, and Ranciére’s concept of ‘the shop of history’, this course will examine writings by early-nineteenth-century urban peripatetics who took to the streets of London as observers of everyday life. Students will be asked to consider the ways in which strolling, walking and loitering can be seen in these texts as disruptions and/or refigurations of the space-time of the burgeoning British nation and its consolidation of national and imperial identity, inscriptions and/or destabilisations of urban space in terms of gender and class, as well as negotiations of emerging forms of commodity capitalism.

      Set Texts:

      • Charles Dickens, Night Walks.
      • Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
      • Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia.

      A Course Reader will be made available on Blackboard prior to the beginning of semester.

    • 17364 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Culture - Gender - Media: Unreliable Narration (Lukas Lammers)
      Schedule: Mi 14:00-16:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-16)
      Location: JK 27/106 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      This course aims to provide insights into concepts and examples of unreliable narration across a variety of genres and media. Narrators wield enormous power: they build worlds and guide readers in numerous ways (not least morally and emotionally). But what if the narrator abuses this power to create and guide? What if the narrator does not tell the truth, or at least ‘bends it’? And what is the truth of/in fiction anyway? How would we be able to establish the fictional truth of a text? What makes us trust or distrust a narrator? In this course, we want to explore the phenomenon of unreliable narration and see how deep the rabbit hole goes. This will lead us to consider some fundamental questions about literature and interpretation and to read some fascinating texts.

      We will start with William C. Booth’s classic definition of the term in his book The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) to discuss its insights and possible shortcomings. In the course of the semester, we will then explore alternative concepts of unreliability, including cognitive, rhetorical, and genre-based approaches. This will allow us to analyse techniques used by authors to create unreliable narrators in literature and film and examine the ways in which unreliable narration challenges traditional notions of truth and reality.

      Close readings will be essential to our discussion. We will study two novels, extracts from several other novels, selected short fiction, as well as a few examples from film and discuss how far unreliability is bound up with notions of gender, race, class, and genre. What leads us to suspect that something is amiss? Is it the text itself? Is it more widely shared ‘frames’? What about texts narrated by machines?

      Students wishing to participate must have completed the AM Surveying English Literatures. Assessment will be on the basis of short contributions to a Blackboard forum/wiki, a short presentation in class (‘aktive Teilnahme’) and a final essay of 4000 words to be submitted after the end of class. One of the core readings for this seminar is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Students wishing to participate might want to acquire the book before the start of term (Recommended: Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. 1988. London: Faber and Faber, 2010).

  • Specialization Module D5: Sociolinguistics and Varieties

    0546bA1.12
    • 17366 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Socioling. and Varieties of English: Asian Englishes (Sofia Rüdiger)
      Schedule: Di 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: JK 27/106 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      English is spoken around the world, but, in this course, we will focus on one specific regional context: Asia. The contexts of use of English in Asia are dynamic, vibrant, and complex. Drawing on a diverse range of materials and previous research, we will explore, among others, the Englishes of India, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, China, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. Besides the linguistic description of different Asian English varieties, this course will also consider the role of English in the linguistic landscape, language policies, cultural artefacts (such as K-pop), and language attitudes.

  • Specialization Module D6: Structure of English

    0546bA1.13
  • Specialization Module D1: Modernity and Alterity in the Literatures of Medieval Britain

    0546bA1.8
    • 17351 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Literatures of Medieval Britain: Authorship (Wolfram Keller)
      Schedule: Mo 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-14)
      Location: KL 29/208 Übungsraum (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      The question as to what it means to be an author has been fueled in recent years by the omnipresence of texts generated by Large Language Models such as ChatGPT. In this seminar, we shall look into the history of authorship to see how writers in the (late) Middle Ages and the early modern period thought about authorship, about literary innovation and about individuality. At the beginning of the semester, we shall reconsider the history of – and theories about – authorship, especially the debates concerning the death (and resurrection) of the author. We will then consider recent work focused particularly on medieval and early modern authorship, before we shall turn to medieval and early modern literary texts – selected on the basis of the participants’ interests – to see how writers represent conceptualizations of literary authorship within their works.   

    • 17352 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Literatures of Medieval Britain: Dark-Age Britain (Wolfram Keller)
      Schedule: Di 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: KL 29/208 Übungsraum (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      This seminar focuses on beginnings – more specifically on the question of the beginnings of Britain. One of the key ‘historical’ texts for the history of Britain in the late Middle Ages and the ‘Renaissance' is Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, in which Geoffrey recounts how Britain was first founded by the Trojan Brutus. The Trojan origins of Britain are not the only (invented and inventive) episode within the Historia that inspired English authors to reflect about the history of Britain, the story of the legendary King Leir, re-staged, as it were, in William Shakespeare’s King Lear being another. The latter is one of several Shakespeare plays which is set in what one could refer to as dark-age Britain. In the course of the semester, we shall read theses plays – King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet – with a view to how they construct ‘medieval’ ‘English' history and the ways in which these constructions become poetologically productive.             

  • Specialization Module D2: Literary Studies: Periods - Genres - Concepts

    0546bA1.9
    • 17353 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Periods - Genres - Concepts: Modernism and the Animal (Jennifer Wawrzinek)
      Schedule: Mo 16:00-18:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-14)
      Location: JK 31/124 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      In 1871 Charles Darwin published his ground-breaking theory of evolution, The Descent of Man, in which he describes human evolution as arising from processes of biological adaptation and natural selection. In positing that all species of life have descended from common ancestors, Darwin destabilised the distinction between human and nonhuman beings, thus radically undermining the assumption of human privilege within the natural world. Although the Victorian attitude toward Darwinism maintained an attempt to sustain a humanist worldview, Modernist writers in the early twentieth century can be seen to invert the traditional humanist position by valuing and embracing animal force or animal consciousness. This course will examine the role of the animal and the relation between human and animal in key texts by Modernist writers in the first half of the twentieth century. Beginning with Darwin’s theories of evolution, students will read novels and poems by writers such as Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot and Ted Hughes, in order to examine the ways in which Modernist writers have engaged with the paradoxical status of the human as both primate, material body and abstract intellectual mind. Students will be encouraged to ask questions around the role of the animal in Modernist writing as either a critique of, and/or potential answer to the alienation that many writers of the period felt as the primary condition of Moderntiy.

      Set Texts: 

      • Woolf, Virginia. Flush.
      • Lawrence, D.H. The Fox.

      A Course Reader will be made available on Blackboard prior to the beginning of semester.

      Assessment: one 4000-word essay due after the end of semester

       

    • 17354 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Periods - Genres - Concepts: Shakespeare's Romances (Stephan Laqué)
      Schedule: Mi 16:00-18:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-16)
      Location: JK 27/106 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      Shakespeare’s late plays form a fairly distinct group of texts whose artificial and often incoherent plotlines, improbable changes of events and less-than-subtle spectacle seem to jar with the seriousness and craftsmanship of his revered comedies and tragedies. We will look at these ‘Romances’ not as a finale to Shakespeare’s work, but as plays which cut across different genres, philosophical concerns and textual strategies. Central issues will be strangeness, magic, suffering and movement. Please purchase print editions of the following texts (preferably Arden or the Norton Shakespeare) which we are going to read in this order: Cymbeline, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest.

    • 17355 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Periods - Genres - Concepts: Scotland's HisStories (Cordula Lemke)
      Schedule: Fr 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-25)
      Location: KL 29/208 Übungsraum (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      Today's image of Scotland is still dominated by the myth of peaty and moss-covered Highlands and their tartan-wearing inhabitants who entertain weary travellers with tales of ghosts and murderers. These apparently old and authentic traditions can often be traced back to the need to create a Scottish national identity in the eighteenth century and many of them were reshaped and invented by the highly prolific writer Sir Walter Scott who can indeed be seen as one of the main sources of this mythical image of Scotland – or “Scott-land”. Not only have these inventions found their way into the novels of Scott’s time, but their legacy still remains today. In this seminar we will look at the myths Scott created, at how these inventions affect the image of Scotland today and how and whether the myths are contested by today’s rewritings.

      Texts:

      • Walter Scott, Waverley (Penguin Classics)
      • Alan Warner, Nothing Left to Fear from Hell
      • Val McDermid, Queen Macbeth

    • 17356 Advanced Seminar
      VS-Periods - Genres - Concepts: Poetry and Prose of the Romantic Period (Susanne Schmid)
      Schedule: Termine siehe LV-Details (Class starts on: 2025-05-10)
      Location: J 27/14 (Habelschwerdter Allee 45)

      Comments

      The Romantic age, the period between 1760 and 1830, was not only a politically rebellious phase but also rich in literature, particularly in a poetry that departed from previous rules. Among the themes of this new poetry were the miraculous, the fantastic, the monstrous, sublime and beautiful nature as well as the rebellious and solitary individual. We will read and discuss poems by William Blake, William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy B. Shelley, John Keats, the 'big six', but also by well-known women poets, for example Charlotte Smith and Mary Robinson. In addition, we will look at prose texts, ranging from fiction to essay writing.

      Our central prose text will be William Godwin's forceful novel Things as They Are; or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794), which famously highlights the topics of justice and power. Shorter poetological texts as well as documents about the wider political context (the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars) will round off the picture. Besides, we will look into Romantic-period print culture.

      Course requirements: regular and active attendance, oral presentation, term paper (Hausarbeit).

      Reading:

      • William Godwin, Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle (London: Penguin Classics, 2003).

      Further information about the poems will be made available.

      Recommended background reading:

      • Frederick Burwick, A History of Romantic Literature (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2019).
      • Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 3rd or 4th ed. (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2006 / 2012). This book contains most of the shorter text we will be reading as well as very useful introductions to authors and contexts. You may want to look at it.

       

    • Specialization Module D7: Semantics and Pragmatics 0546aA1.14
    • Specialization Module D8: Language Change 0546aA1.15
    • Specialization Module D7: Semantics and Pragmatics 0546bA1.14
    • Specialization Module D8: Language Change 0546bA1.15